Paulo Freitas has released a new iOS app for the note takers. scriptus - quick and easy note taking app enhances note taking experience from the basic Notes app built into the OS by giving us a better on-screen keyboard, more apps to export the notes to and directly links to Twitter and Facebook. The app looks sharp on the iPad's Retina Display.

Features

scriptus - quick and easy note taking offers an enhanced on-screen keyboard that eliminates extra screen switches to hunt down the most used punctuations. The on-screen keyboard in scriptus adds a top row keys, each of them includes 5 punctuations and numbers. You only have to press and swipe at the direction of the punctuation you need to select it, and if it's the center one you need, just tap on that button. Since the top row keys include most of the commonly used punctuations as well as numbers, you'll hardly have to switch to other keyboard screens for most notes you take. Nice! We only wish that the developer would include a short tutorial to explain how to use the top row keys and what they do.

In addition to the enhanced keyboard, scriptus - quick and easy note taking app also has basic note taking functions such as undo, redo, bullet points, arrow points, zoom in and out and more. The app offers voice notes as well. For the serious note takers, scriptus gives you a full set of Mac fonts including serif and sans-serif fonts as well as some really nice script fonts. If you're really picky about how your notes should look, you'll like the selection of the fonts in this app. There are a few background colors as well, but they only change the color not the texture of the paper or notebook style of the background. It would have been neat to see a textured paper background with these nice script fonts.

One of the biggest challenges for users who use the default Notes is the limitation in export the notes. It's tough to move the notes around if you don't want to use Email syncing. Even if you do sync with email, you will need to copy/paste your notes into other apps. scriptus - quick and easy note taking offers additional export options. If you have other notes apps, such as Evernote, Notebooks or Offices suites, installed on your iOS device, you can export the notes you created in scriptus directly into these apps in either TXT files or PDF. If you export them as PDF, you can even add them into ebook readers including iBooks, Kindle and more. As with many 3rd party note apps, you can sync notes created in scriptus in iTunes under Apps/Fire Sharing. The notes will sync to your desktop as text files.

One additional export features we rarely see is the direct posting to Twitter and Facebook. As soon as you log into your favorite Twitter or Facebook app, you can use scriptus to create posts and post them through any app linked to your accounts directly. This feature alone will attract those who post their thoughts to social networks consistently. And yes, you can copy and paste URLs in the notes as well. There's also a print function should you need to get something on paper.

Conclusion

scriptus - quick and easy note taking has some most intriguing and useful tools in a note app including an enhanced keyboard, more ways of exporting and sync files as well as a large number of fonts. The app works in either portrait or landscape mode and comes in both English and Portuguese. The notes and fonts look sharp and clear on the Retina iPad and iPhone devices, and it auto saves both text and audio notes. We experienced a crash when trying to export as PDF, but overall the app is stable and polished. If you're a note taker that require something fancier than the built-in Notes app, do give scriptus a look.